Expert witnesses in civil proceedings are legally required to be independent. The current recusal mechanism relies on self-declaration and adversarial challenge — a slow, qualitative process with no quantitative standard for assessing the network proximity between an expert and the parties they serve.
This paper applies network proximity analysis — using Erdős-number methodology on academic co-authorship and supervisory graphs — to demonstrate that the existing procedural standard is structurally inadequate. In the case study examined, the Azevedo-Henriques relationship places the expert witness at Erdős distance 1 from the commissioning party: a level of proximity held by approximately 500 people globally, indistinguishable from direct collaboration, and automatically within the statutory appearance standard for recusal — yet one that went unchallenged under existing procedure.
The paper proposes a formal network proximity threshold — grounded in scale-free network statistics — as a required component of expert appointment procedure across European civil proceedings.
This paper is part of a broader body of work by the author examining the structural failures of dispute resolution systems — in traditional legal proceedings, in IP protection mechanisms, and in the emerging architecture of digital financial infrastructure. The academic diagnosis in this paper is one register of a single argument expressed across three domains.
KYC.co — contract-backed ADR platform with expert adduction embedded at the contract layer. Built in response to the gap this paper identifies: a dispute resolution infrastructure that does not depend on a court system already operating beyond capacity.
Moral.Money — gamified procedural reasoning engine. Makes the problem of expert neutrality and institutional capture legible to a non-specialist audience through AI-driven argumentation and historical narrative.
Carroll, S. (2026). Network Proximity and Expert Impartiality: An Empirical Analysis of Academic Network Proximity as a Structural Test for Expert Recusal in European Civil Proceedings. Working paper. SSRN 6905898. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6905898